BETHEL -- Ancient wooden masks and skin drums that could be in a museum. A song about seal hunting that lured the writer's daughter to the stage. Hip-hop, Bethel style.
Bethel's Cama-i Dance Festival -- three days of drumming and singing, fry-bread eating and ice-cream-cone licking, learning, teaching and storytelling through dance -- wrapped up Sunday.
"There are certain things in the universe that just is. You don't have a choice. So you go with the flow," said Chuna McIntyre, whose Yup'ik name is Nengqerralria. "The universe wants us to dance, so we dance. It's important. It's part of the whole thing."
McIntyre, who grew up in Eek, is leader of the Nunamta Yup'ik Singers and Dancers and was honored at the festival as a "living treasure."
Perhaps no one epitomized the lure and joy of dance more than Emily Slats of Chevak, who busted it out on stage with the village's Cev'armuit Kinguliaret Yurartait, a name that refers to Chevak's younger generation dancers. She worked up a sweat. She made silly faces, seemingly without a care. She exaggerated every symbolic move -- the waves of the ocean, the flock of seabirds swooping down, a person acting crazy to make a baby laugh.
She never stopped moving. She lit up the crowd, and their laughter and hoots fueled her to push even harder.
"That means they are loving my dance!" she said, laughing after the group's last performance. Slats has been dancing for years. She used to be shy on stage but now it's the opposite. She was eager to get home to Chevak, but not to rest.
"They are having a festival back home. We're trying to see if we can dance for them!" she said.
During a song on seal hunting written by the late Ulric Ulroan, Cecilia Martz -- originally from Chevak -- took to the stage and danced with the group.
"That's my dad's song. When we hear our dad's song, we have to go up," said Martz.
An elder from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Elders Home climbed up and started dancing to that one, too. Johnny Attie is from Kipnuk and wasn't connected to Chevak. But he seemed compelled when he heard the seal-hunting song. He spoke about it, in Yup'ik.
The youngest from the Chevak group is Chandler Ulroan, 11. He is small and at his first Cama-i. But he drummed with the men on song after song. His mother, Agatha, said she was at her first Cama-i, too. "I was proud to be here with him," she said.
The festival takes place at Bethel Regional High School. In a classroom, a series of "Up Close and Personal" sessions let the audience connect with the performers.
When the King Island Traditional Dancers from Nome had their session, they opened up big wooden crates and set out ancient masks, headdresses made of eagle feathers and skin drums. Real skin drums.
Two were made from the stomach of a single walrus. Two others came from the membranes of bowhead whale livers, said Bryan Muktoyuk, who describes himself as the "guy behind the leader," Sylvester Ayek.
Other dance groups now almost all use synthetic materials for their drums.
The King Island group is made up of Inupiat who used to live in that long-abandoned community, and their descendants. Two wooden masks of medicine men dated back hundreds of years.
The skin drums, the ancient masks, the big mitts with ivory ornaments -- all of it is used in the dance.
Some museum conservators came to the group's talk.
"We work in museums and we see this stuff in the cabinets and in the displays," said Ellen Carrlee, a conservator at the Alaska State Museum doing her doctoral research on gut skin. "We are very careful, with gloves. To see them using these things, dancing with these things and seeing how they are supposed to move, is amazing."
Maybe gut skin is coming back, she said.
The walrus gut drums were small. That's because of the challenge -- and expense -- of getting a walrus. That's why they made two drums from a single stomach.
Muktoyuk, a singer and drummer, said he wasn't allowed to drum when he was a boy, so he danced instead. King Island dancers, so isolated on the island for so long, had strict rules about that sort of thing. But now kids are encouraged. His own son, now 5 years old, has been drumming since he was 3.
Cama-i, as a whole, is trying to reach out to a younger audience. This year's theme was "Generations Celebrating Through Dance." Featured solo performer Byron Nicholai, a Toksook Bay teenage singer, writer and drummer with rock star magnetism, drew crowds of teens and elders as well. Some kids then swarmed him in the hallways.
There were also Bethel PRIDE Dancers, back for the second year and led by 16-year-old Mike Bialy. The group performs a version of hip-hop dance called "dub step."
"One day we were just watching these videos on YouTube," Bialy said. It was a kind of dancing his group had never seen in Bethel. He remembers thinking, "Dang, that looks really cool. At the time we didn't know what it was called. So we called it dub step dancing. Now here in Bethel that's what we call it."
And it's taking off. At last year's Cama-i, just two kids joined him dancing on stage.
This year, there were maybe a dozen. Some came from an Anchorage hip-hop group, Artistic Drift, but Bethel teens were in the mix, too.
"It's just amazing to feel I could share my passion with other people," Bialy said.